Thus for him would the trancèd scene for ever survive.
The History Sixth were for the purposes of cricket linked to the Classical Lower Sixth, but Michael did not play that term. Instead, a strayed reveller, he would move from game to game of the Junior School, hearing the shrill encouragement and pondering the rose-red agility of a Classical lower form, in triumph over minor Moderns. Michael was continually trying to perceive successors to himself and Alan, and he would often enter into shy colloquy with the juniors, who were awed by his solemn smile, and shuffled uneasily from leg to leg.
Two boys whom Michael finally determined should stand as types of Alan and him gradually emerged from the white throng of Lower School cricket. One of them was indeed very like Alan, and had the same freckled smile. With this pair Michael became intimate, as one becomes intimate with two puppies. He would pet and scold them, encourage them to be successful in their sport, and rebuke them for failure. They perhaps found him entertaining, and were certainly proud to be seen in conversation with him, for though Michael himself was not an athletic hero, he was the companion of heroes, and round him clung the shining mirage of their immortality.
Then one day, unknown to Michael, these two boys became involved in a scandal; the inquisition of a great public school pinned them down desperately struggling, miserably afraid; the rumour of their expulsion went callously round the gossiping ranks of their fellows. Michael was informed of their disgrace by dark-eyed Mallock whose father wrote columnar letters to The Times. Michael said bitter things to the complacent Mallock and offered with serious want of dignity for a member of the leisurely and cultivated History Sixth, to punch Mallock’s damned head.
Mallock said sneeringly that he supposed Michael sympathized with the little beasts. Michael replied that hemerely sympathized with them because he was profoundly sure that it was a pack of lies.
“You’d better go and tell the Old Man that, because they say he’s going to expel them to-day.”
Michael turned pale with fury.
“I damned well will go, and when I come back I’ll ram you upside down in the Tuck Shop butter-tub.”
Mallock flushed under the ignominy of this threat, and muttered his conviction that Michael was talking through his hat. Just then Mr. Kirkham entered the class-room, and Michael immediately went up to him and asked if he might go and speak to the Headmaster.
Mr. Kirkham stared with amazement, and his voice, which always seemed to hesitate whether it should come out through his mouth or his nose, on this occasion never came out at all, but stayed in the roof of Mr. Kirkham’s mouth.
“Can I, sir?” Michael repeated.
“I suppose you can,” said Mr. Kirkham.
The class followed Michael’s exit with wide eyes; even the phlegmatic Strang was so deeply moved that he sat upright in his chair and tapped his head to indicate midsummer madness.
Outside in the echoing corridor, where the plaster casts looked coldly down, Michael wrestled with his leaping heart, forcing it into tranquillity so that he could grapple with the situation he had created for himself. By the Laocoön he paused. Immediately beyond was the sombre doorway of the Head’s room. As he paused on the threshold two ridiculous thoughts came to him—that Lessing’s Laocoön was one of the set books for the English Literature prize, and that he would rather be struggling in the coils of that huge stone snake than standing thus invertebrate before this portentous door.
Then Michael tapped. There was no answer but adull buzz of voices. Again Michael tapped and, beating down his heart, turned the handle that seemed as he held it to swell to pumpkin size in his grasp. Slowly he pushed the door before him, expecting to hear a bellowed summons to appear, and wondering whether he could escape unknown to his class-room if his nerve failed him even now. Then he heard the sound of tears, and indignation drove him onwards, drove him so urgently that actually he slammed the great door behind him, and made the intent company aware of his presence.
“What doyouwant?” shouted Dr. Brownjohn. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“I want to speak to you, sir.” The words actually seemed to come from his mouth winged with flames, such a volcano was Michael now.
“I’m busy. Go outside and wait,” roared the Headmaster.
Michael paused to regard the scene—the two boys sobbing with painful regular intake of breath, oblivious of him; the witnesses, a sheepish crew; the school-porter waiting for his prey; old Mr. Caryll coughing nervously and apparently on the verge of tears himself; the odious Paul Pry of a Secretary nibbling his pen; and in the background other masters waiting with favourable or damning testimony.
The drama of gloating authority shook Michael to the very foundation of his being, and he came rapidly into the middle of the room, came right up to the Headmaster, until he felt engulfed in the black silk gown, and at last said slowly and with simple conviction:
“I think you’re all making a mistake.”
When he had spoken Michael could have kicked himself for not shouting furiously the torrid denunciations which had come surging up for utterance. Then he immediately began to talk again, to his own great surprize, calmly and very reasonably.
“I know these kids—these two boys, I mean—quite well. It’s impossible for any of this to be true. I’ve seen them a lot this term—practically every day. Really, sir, you’ll make a terrible mistake if you expel them. They’re awfully decent little chaps. They are really, sir. Of course they’re too frightened now to say anything for themselves. It’s not fair for everybody to be set at them like this.”
Michael looked despairingly at the masters assembled.
“And these other boys who’ve been brought in to tell what they know. Why, they’re frightened too. They’d say anything. Why don’t you, why don’t you——”
Michael looked round in despair, stammered, broke down, and then to his own eternal chagrin burst into tears. He moved hastily over to the window, striving to pull himself together, seeing through an overpowering blur the great green field in the garish sunlight. Yet his tears, shameful to him, may have turned the scale, for one by one the masters came forward with eager testimony of good; and with every word of praise the tears rushed faster and faster to Michael’s eyes. Then he heard old Caryll’s rasping cough and broken benignant sentences, which with all their memories lulled his emotion to quietude again.
“Hope you’ll bring it in non probatum, Headmaster”—cough—cough—“good boys both”—cough—cough—“sure it’s a mistake—Fane’s a good boy too—idle young rascal—but a good heart”—cough—cough—“had him under me for a year—know him well——”
Dr. Brownjohn, with a most voluminous wave, dismissed the matter. Everyone, even the Paul Pry of a Secretary, went out of the room, and as the door closed Michael heard Mr. Caryll addressing the victims.
“Now then, don’t cry any more, you young boobies.”
Michael’s thoughts followed them upstairs to the jollyclass-room, and he almost smiled at the imagination of Mr. Caryll’s entrance and the multitudinous jokes that would demonstrate his relief at his pupils’ rescue. Michael recovered from his dream to find the Headmaster speaking to him in his most rumbling bass.
“I don’t know why I allowed you to interfere in this disgraceful affair, boy. Um?”
“No, sir,” Michael agreed.
“But since you are here, I will take the opportunity of warning you that the company you keep is very vile.”
Michael looked apprehensive.
“If you think nothing is known of your habits out of school, you are much mistaken. I will not have any boy at my school frequenting the house of that deboshed nincompoop Wilmot.”
Dr. Brownjohn’s voice was now so deep that it vibrated in the pit of Michael’s stomach like the diapason of the school organ.
“Give up that detestable association of mental impostors and be a boy again. You have disappointed me during the whole of your career; but you’re a winning boy. Um? Go back to your work.”
Michael left the august room with resolves swaying in his brain, wondering what he could do to repay the Old Man. It was too late to take a very high place in the summer examinations. Yet somehow, so passionate was his gratitude, he managed to come out third.
Michael never told his mother about his adventure, but in the reaction against Wilmot and all that partook of decadence, and in his pleasure at having done something, however clumsily, he felt a great wish to include his mother in his emotion of universal love.
“Where are we going these holidays?” he asked.
“I thought perhaps you’d like to stay at your monastery again,” said Mrs. Fane. “I was thinking of going abroad.”
Michael’s face fell, and his mother was solicitously penitent.
“My dearest boy, I never dreamed you would want to be with me. You’ve always gone out on Sundays.”
“I know, I’m sorry, I won’t again,” Michael assured her.
“And I’ve made my arrangements now. I wish I’d known. But why shouldn’t you go and see Stella? It seems a pity that you and she should grow up so much apart.”
“Well, I will, if you like,” said Michael.
“Dearest boy, what has happened to you? You are so agreeable,” exclaimed Mrs. Fane.
In the end it was arranged that Michael should accompany Mr. Viner on his holiday in France, and afterwards stay with Stella with a family at Compiègne for the rest of the time. Michael went to see his mother off at Charing Cross before he joined Mr. Viner.
“Darling Michael,” she murmured as the train began to move slowly forward. “You’re looking so well and happy—just like you were two years ago. Just like——”
The rest of the comparison was lost in the noise of the speeding train.
MICHAEL spent a charming fortnight with Father Viner in Amiens, Chartres and Rouen. The early Masses to which they went along the cool, empty streets of the morning, and the shadowy, candle-lit Benedictions from which they came home through the deepening dusk gave to Michael at least a profound hope, if not the astonishing faith of his first religious experience. Sitting with the priest at the open window of their inn, while down below the footsteps of the wayfarers were pattering like leaves, Michael recaptured some of that emotion of universal love which with sacramental force had filled his heart during the wonder of transition from boyhood to adolescence. He did not wish to know more about these people than could be told by the sound of their progress so light, so casual, so essentially becoming to the sapphirine small world in which they hurried to and fro. The passion of hope overwhelmed Michael’s imagination with a beauty that was perfectly expressed by the unseen busy populations of a city’s waning twilight. Love, birth, death, greed, ambition, all humanity’s stress of thought and effort, were merged in a murmurous contentment of footfalls and faint-heard voices. Michael supposed that somehow to God the universe must sound much as this tall street of Rouen sounded now to him at his inn window, and he realized for the first time how God must love the world. Later, the twilight and voices and footfalls would fade together into night, and through long star-scattered silences Michael would brood witha rapture that became more than hope, if less than faith with restless, fiery heart. Then clocks would strike sonorously; the golden window-panes would waver and expire; Mr. Viner would tap his pipe upon the sill; and Michael and he would follow their own great shadows up into bedrooms noisy in the night-wind and prophetic of sleep’s immense freedom, until with the slanting beams of dawn Michael would wake and at Mass time seek to enchain with prayers indomitable dreams.
The gravity of Michael’s demeanour suited the grey town in which he sojourned, and though Mr. Viner used to teaze him about his saintly exterior, the priest seemed to enjoy his company.
“But don’t look so solemn when you meet your sister, or she’ll think you’re sighing for a niche in Chartres Cathedral, which for a young lady emancipated from Germany would be a most distressing thought.”
“I’m enjoying myself,” said Michael earnestly.
“My dear old chap, I’m not questioning that for a moment, and personally I find your attitude consorts very admirably with the mood in which these northern towns of France always throw me,” said Mr. Viner.
The fortnight came to an end, and to commemorate this chastening interlude of a confidence and a calm whose impermanence Michael half dreaded, half desired, he bought a pair of old candlesticks for the Notting Dale Mission. Michael derived a tremendous consolation from this purchase, for he felt that, even if in the future he should be powerless to revive this healing time, its austere hours would be immortalized, mirrored somehow in the candlesticks’ bases as durably as if engraved upon a Grecian urn. There was in this impulse nothing more sentimental than in his erection last year of the small cairn to celebrate a fleeting moment of faith on the Berkshire downs.
Stella was already settled in the bosom of the French family when Michael reached Compiègne, and as he drove towards the Pension he began for the first time to wonder what his sister would be like after these two years. He was inclined to suppose that she would be a problem, and he already felt qualms about the behaviour of her projected suddenly like this from Germany into an atmosphere of romance. For Michael, France always stood out as typically romantic to his fancy. Spain and Italy were not within his realization as yet, and Germany he conceived of as a series of towns filled with the noise of piano-scales and hoarse gutturals. He hoped that Stella was not even now plunged into a girlish love-affair with one of the idle young Frenchmen who haunted so amorously the sunshine of this gay land. He even began to rehearse, as his carriage jolted along the cobbled embankment of the Oise, a particularly scathing scene in which he coldly denounced the importunate lover, while Stella stood abashed by fraternal indignation. Then he reflected that after all Stella was only fifteen and, as he remembered her, too much wrapped up in a zest for public appreciation to be very susceptible of private admiration. Moreover, he knew that most of her time was occupied by piano-practice. An emotion of pride in his accomplished sister displaced the pessimism of his first thoughts. He took pleasure in the imagination of her swaying the whole Pension by her miraculous execution, and he began to build up the picture of his entrance upon the last crashing chords of a sonata, when after the applause had ceased he would modestly step forward as the brother of this paragon.
The carriage was now bowling comfortably along a wide tree-shaded avenue bordered on either side by stretches of greenery which were dappled with children and nursemaids and sedate little girls with bobbing pigtails. Michael wondered if Stella was making a discreet promenade withthe ladies of the family, half hoped she was, that he might reach the Pension before her and gracefully welcome her, as she, somewhat flustered by being late for his arrival, hurried up the front-door steps. Then, just as he was wondering whether there would or would not be front-door steps to the Pension, the cab drew up by a house with a green verandah and front-garden geranium-dyed to right and left of a vivid gravel path. Michael perceived, with a certain disapproval, that the verandah sheltered various ladies in wicker chairs. He disliked the notion of carrying up his bag in the range of their cool criticism, nor did he relish the conversation that would have to be embarked upon with the neat maid already hurrying to meet him. But most contrary to his preconceived idea of arrival was the affectionate ambush laid for him by Stella just when he was trying to remember whether ‘chambre’ were masculine or feminine. Yet, even as he felt Stella’s dewy lips on his, and her slim fingers round his neck, he reproached himself for his silly shyness, although he could only say:
“Hullo, look out for my collar.”
Stella laughed ripplingly.
“Oh, Michael,” she cried, “I’m most frightfully glad to see you, you darling old Michael.”
Michael looked much alarmed at the amazing facility of her affectionate greeting, and vaguely thought how much easier existence must be to a girl who never seemed to be hampered by any feeling of what people within earshot would think of her. Yet almost immediately Stella herself relapsed into shyness at the prospect of introducing Michael to the family, and it was only the perfectly accomplished courtesy of Madame Regnier which saved Michael from summarily making up his mind that these holidays were going to be a most ghastly failure.
The business of unpacking composed his feelings slightly,and a tap at his door, followed by Stella’s silvery demand to come in, gave him a thrill of companionship. He suddenly realized, too, that he and his sister had corresponded frequently during their absence, and that this queer shyness at meeting her in person was really absurd. Stella, wandering round the room with his ties on her arm, gave Michael real pleasure, and she for her part seemed highly delighted at the privilege of superintending his unpacking.
He noted with a sentimental fondness that she still hummed, and he was very much impressed by the flowers which she had arranged in the cool corners of the pleasant room. On her appearance, too, as she hung over the rail of his bed chatting to him gaily, he congratulated himself. He liked the big apple-green bows in her chestnut hair; he liked her slim white hands and large eyes; and he wondered if her smile were like his, and hoped it was, since it was certainly very subtle and attractive.
“What sort of people hang out in this place?” he asked.
“Oh, nice people,” Stella assured him. “Madame Regnier is a darling, and she loves my playing, and Monsieur is fearfully nice, with a grey beard. We always play billiards in the evening, and drink cassis. It’s lovely. There are three darling old ladies, widows I think. They sit and listen to me playing, and when I’ve finished pay me all sorts of compliments, which sound so pretty in French. One of them said I was ‘ravissante.’”
“Are there any kids?” asked Michael.
Stella said there were no kids, and Michael sighed his relief.
“Do you practise much?”
“Oh, no, I’m having a holiday, I only practise three hours a day.”
“How much?” asked Michael. “Good Lord, do you call that a holiday?”
“Why, you silly old thing, of course it is,” rippled Stella.
Presently it was time for déjeuner, and they sat down to eat in a room, of shaded sunlight, watching the green jalousies that glowed like beryls, and listening to a canary’s song. Michael was introduced to Madame Graves, Madame Lamarque and Madame Charpentier, the three old widows who lived at the Pension, and who all looked strangely alike, with their faces and hands of aged ivory and their ruffles and wristbands starched to the semblance of fretted white coral. They ate mincingly in contrast to M. Regnier who, guarded by a very large napkin, pitchforked his food into his mouth with noisy recklessness. Later in the mellow August afternoon Michael and he walked solemnly round the town together, and Michael wondered if he had ever before raised his hat so many times.
After dinner, when the coffee and cassis had been drunk, Madame Regnier invited Stella to play to them. Dusk was falling in the florid French drawing-room, but so rich was the approach of darkness that no lamps brooded with rosy orbs, and only a lighted candle on either side of Stella stabbed the gloom in which the listeners leaned quietly back against the tropic tapestries of their chairs, without trying to occupy themselves with books or crochet-work.
Michael sat by the scented window, watching the stars twinkle, it almost seemed, in tune with the vibrant melodies that Stella rang out. In the bewitching candlelight the keyboard trembled and shimmered like water to a low wind. Deep in the shadow the three old ladies sat in a waxen ecstasy, so still that Michael wondered whether they were alive. He did not know whose tunes they were that Stella played; he did not know what dreams they wove for the old ladies, whether of spangled opera-house or ball; he did not care, being content to watch the lissome hands that from time to time went dancing awayon either side from the curve of Stella’s straight back, whether to play with raindrops in the treble or marshal thunders from the bass. The candlelight sprayed her flowing chestnut hair with a golden mist that might have been an aureole over which the apple-green bows floated unsubstantial like amazing moths.
Michael continually tried to shape his ideas to the inspiration of the music, but every image that rose battling for expression lost itself in a peerless stupefaction.
Then suddenly Stella stopped playing, and the enchantment was dispelled by murmurous praise and entering lamplight. Stella, slim as a fountain, stood upright in the centre of the drawing-room and, like a fountain, swayed now this way, now that, to catch the compliments so dear to her. Michael wished the three old ladies would not appeal to him to endorse their so perfectly phrased enthusiasm, and grew very conscious of the gradual decline of ‘oui’ into ‘wee’ as he supported their laudation. He was glad when M. Regnier proposed a game of billiards, and glad to see that Stella could romp, romp so heartily indeed that once or twice he had to check a whispered rebuke.
But later on when he said good night to her outside his bedroom, he had an impulse to hug her close for the unimaginable artistry of this little sister.
Michael and Stella went out next day to explore the forest of Compiègne. They wandered away from the geometrical forest roads into high glades and noble chases; they speculated upon the whereabouts of the wild-boars that were hunted often, and therefore really did exist; they lay deep in the bracken utterly remote in the ardent emerald light, utterly quiet save for the thrum of insects rising and falling. In this intimate seclusion Michael found it easy enough to talk to Stella. Somehow her face, magnified by the proportions of the surroundingvegetation, scarcely seemed to belong to her, and Michael had a sensation of a fairy fellowship, as he felt himself being absorbed into her wide and strangely magical eyes. Seen like this they were as overwhelmingly beautiful as two flowers, holding mysteries of colour and form that could never be revealed save thus in an abandonment of contemplation.
“Why do you stare at me, Michael?” she asked.
“Because I think it’s funny to realize that you and I are as nearly as it’s possible to be the same person, and yet we’re as different from each other as we are from the rest of people. I wonder, if you didn’t know I was your brother, and I didn’t know you were my sister, if we should have a sort of—what’s the word?—intuition about it? For instance, you can play the piano, and I can’t even understand the feeling of being able to play the piano. I wish we knew our father. It must be interesting to have a father and a mother, and see what part of one comes from each.”
“I always think father and mother weren’t married,” said Stella.
Michael blushed hotly, taken utterly aback.
“I say, my dear girl, don’t say things like that. That’s a frightful thing to say.”
“Why?”
“Why? Why, because people would be horrified to hear a little girl talking like that,” Michael explained.
“Oh, I thought you meant they’d be shocked to think of people not being married.”
“I say, really, you know, Stella, you ought to be careful. I wouldn’t have thought you even knew that people sometimes—very seldom, though, mind—don’t get married.”
“You funny old boy,” rippled Stella. “You must think I’m a sort of doll just wound up to play the piano. If I didn’t know that much after going to Germany, why—oh, Michael, I do think you’re funny.”
“I was afraid these beastly foreigners would spoil you,” muttered Michael.
“It’s not the foreigners. It’s myself.”
“Stella!”
“Well, I’m fifteen and a half.”
“I thought girls were innocent,” said Michael with disillusion in his tone.
“Girls grow older quicker than boys.”
“But I mean always innocent,” persisted Michael. “I don’t mean all girls, of course. But—well—a girl like you.”
“Very innocent girls are usually very stupid girls,” Stella asserted.
Michael made a resolution to watch his sister’s behaviour when she came back to London next year to make her first public appearance at a concert. For the moment, feeling overmatched, he changed the trend of his reproof.
“Well, even if you do talk about people not being married, I think it’s rotten to talk about mother like that.”
“You stupid old thing, as if I should do it with anyone but you, and I only talked about her to you because you look so sort of cosy and confidential in these ferns.”
“They’re not ferns—they’re bracken. If I thought such a thing was possible,” declared Michael, “I believe I’d go mad. I don’t think I could ever again speak to anybody I knew.”
“Why not, if they didn’t know?”
“How like a girl! Stella, you make me feel uncomfortable, you do really.”
Stella stretched her full length in the luxurious greenery.
“Well, mother never seems unhappy.”
“Exactly,” said Michael eagerly. “Therefore, what you think can’t possibly be true. If it were, she’d always look miserable.”
“Well, then whowasour father?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Michael gloomily. “I believe he’s in prison—or perhaps he’s in an asylum, or deformed.”
Stella shuddered.
“Michael, what a perfectly horrible idea. Deformed!”
“Well, wouldn’t you sooner he were deformed than that you were—than that—than the other idea?” Michael stammered.
“No, I wouldn’t,” Stella cried. “I’d much, much, much rather that mother was never married.”
Michael tried to drag his mind towards the comprehension of this unnatural sentiment, but the longer he regarded it the worse it seemed, and with intense irony he observed to Stella:
“I suppose you’ll be telling me next that you’re in love.”
“I’m not in love just at the moment,” said Stella blandly.
“Do you mean to say you have been in love?”
“A good deal,” she admitted.
Michael leaped to his feet, and looked down on her recumbent in the bracken.
“But only in a stupid schoolgirly way?” he gasped.
“Yes, I suppose it was,” Stella paused. “But it was fearfully thrilling all the same—especially in duets.”
“Duets?”
“I used to read ahead, and watch where our hands would come together, and then the notes used to get quite slippery with excitement.”
“Look here,” Michael demanded, drawing himself up, “are you trying to be funny?”
“No,” Stella declared, rising to confront Michael. “He was one of my masters. He was only about thirty, and he was killed in Switzerland by an avalanche.”
Michael was staggered by the confession of this shocking and precocious child, as one after another his chimeras rose up to leer at him triumphantly.
“And did he make love to you? Did he try to kiss you?” Michael choked out.
“Oh, no,” said Stella. “That would have spoilt it all.”
Michael sighed under a faint lightening of his load, and Stella came up to him engagingly to slip her arm into his.
“Don’t be angry with me, Michael, because I have wanted so dreadfully to be great friends with you and tell you all my secrets. I want to tell you what I think about when I’m playing; and, Michael, you oughtn’t to be angry with me, because you were simply just made to be told secrets. That’s why I played so well last night. I was telling you a secret all the time.”
“Do you know what it is, Stella?” said Michael, with a certain awe in his voice. “I believe our father is in an asylum, and I believe you and I are both mad—not raving mad, of course—but slightly mad.”
“All geniuses are,” said Stella earnestly.
“But we aren’t geniuses.”
“I am,” murmured Stella in a strangely quiet little voice that sounded in Michael’s ears like the song of a furtive melodious bird.
“Are you?” he whispered, half frightened by this assertion, delivered under huge overarching trees in the burning silence of the forest. “Who told you so?”
“I told myself so. And when I tell myself something very solemnly, I can’t be anything but myself, and I must be speaking the truth.”
“But even if you’re a genius—and I suppose you might be—I’m not a genius. I’m clever, but I’m not a genius.”
“No, but you’re the nearest person to being me, and if you’re not a genius, I think you can understand. Oh, Michael,” Stella cried, clasping his arm to her heart, “you do understand, because you never laughed whenI told you I was a genius. I’ve told lots of girl-friends, and they laugh and say I’m conceited.”
“Well, you are,” said Michael, feeling bound not to lose the opportunity of impressing Stella with disapproval as well as comprehension.
“I know I am. But I must be to go on being myself. Oh, you darling brother, you do understand me. I’ve longed for someone to understand me. Mother’s only proud of me.”
“I’m not at all proud of you,” said Michael crushingly.
“I don’t want you to be. If you were proud of me, you’d think I belonged to you, and I don’t ever want to belong to anybody.”
“I shouldn’t think you ever would,” said Michael encouragingly, as they paced the sensuous mossy path in a rapture of avowals. “I should think you’d frighten anybody except me. But why do you fall in love, then?”
“Oh, because I want to make people die with despair.”
“Great Scott, you are an unearthly kid.”
“Oh, I’m glad I’m unearthly,” said Stella. “I’d like to be a sort of Undine. I think I am. I don’t think I’ve got a soul, because when I play I go rushing out into the darkness to look for my soul, and the better I play the nearer I get.”
Michael stopped beneath an oak-tree and surveyed this extraordinary sister of his.
“Well, I always thought I was a mystic, but, good Lord, you’re fifty times as much of a mystic as I am,” he exclaimed with depressed conviction.
Suddenly Stella gave a loud scream.
“What on earth are you yelling at?” said Michael.
“Oh, Michael, look—a most enormous animal. Oh, look, oh, let me get up a tree. Oh, help me up. Push me up this tree.”
“It’s a wild-boar,” declared Michael in a tone of astonished interest.
Stella screamed louder than ever and clung to Michael, sobbing. The boar, however, went on its way, routing among the herbage.
“Well, you may be a genius,” said Michael, “but you’re an awful little funk.”
“But I was frightened.”
“Wild-boars aren’t dangerous except when they’re being hunted,” Michael asserted positively.
Stella soon became calm under the influence of her brother’s equanimity. Arm-in-arm they sauntered back towards Compiègne, and so for a month of serene weather they sauntered every day, and every day Michael pondered more and more deeply the mystery of woman. He was sorry to say good-bye to Stella when she went back to Germany, and longed for the breathless hour of her first concert, wishful that all his life he might stand between her and the world, the blundering wild-boar of a world.
ALMOST before the confusion of a new term had subsided, Michael put his name down to play football again, and it was something in the nature of an occasion when in the first sweltering Middle-side game he scored six tries. Already his contemporaries had forgotten that he was once a fleet and promising three-quarter, so that his resurrection was regarded as an authentic apparition, startling in its unexpectedness. Michael was the only person not much surprized when he was invited by Abercrombie to play as substitute for one of the Seniors absent from a Big-side trial. Yet even Michael was surprized when in the opening match between Classics and Moderns he read his name on the notice-board as sixteenth man; and when, through the continued illness of the first choice, he actually found himself walking on to the field between the black lines of spectators, he was greatly content. Yet the finest thrill of all came when in the line-out he found himself on the left wing with Alan, with Alan not very unlike the old Alan even now in the coveted Tyrian vest of the Classical First Fifteen.
Into that game Michael poured all he felt of savage detestation for everything that the Modern side stood for. Not an opponent was collared that did not in his falling agony take on the likeness of Percy Garrod; not a Modern half-back was hurled into touch who was not in Michael’s imagination insolent with damnably destructive theories of life. It was exhilarating, it was superb, it was ineffable, the joy of seeing Alan hand off a Modern bounderand swing the ball out low to him crouching vigilant upon the left. It was intoxicating, it was divine to catch the ball, and with zigzag leap and plunge to tear wildly on towards the Modern goal, to hear the Classical lower boys shriek their high-voiced thrilling exhortations, to hear the maledictions of the enemy ricochetting from a force of speed that spun its own stability. Back went the ball to Alan, shouting with flushed face on his right, just as one of the Modern three-quarters, with iron grip round Michael’s faltering knees, fetched him crashing down.
“Good pass,” cried the delighted Classical boys, and “Well run, sir, well run, sir!” they roared as Alan whizzed the ball along to the dapper, the elusive, the incomparable Terry. “Go in, yourself,” they prayed, as Terry like a chamois bounded straight at the despairing full-back, then with a gasp that triumphed over the vibrant hush, checked himself, and in one peerless spring breasted the shoulders of the back to come thudding down upon the turf with a glorious try.
Now the game swayed desperately, and with Alan ever beside him Michael lived through every heroic fight of man. They were at Thermopylae, stemming the Persian charges with hack and thrust and sweeping cut; they were at Platea with Aristides and Pausanias, vowing death rather than subjugation; the body of Terry beneath a weight of Modern forwards, crying, “Let me up, you stinkers!” was fought for as long ago beneath the walls of Troy the battle raged about the body of Patroclus. And when the game was over, when the Moderns had been defeated for the first time in four resentful years of scientific domination, when the Classical Fifteen proudly strode from the field, immortal in muddied Tyrian, it was easy enough to walk across the gravel arm-in-arm with Alan and, while still the noise of the contest and the cries of the onlookers echoed in their ears, it was easy to span theicy floes of two drifting years in one moment of careless, artless intercourse.
“You’ll get your Second Fifteen colours,” said Alan confidently.
“Not this year,” Michael thought.
“You’ll get your Third Fifteen cap for a snip.”
“Yes, I ought to get that,” Michael agreed.
“Well, that’s damned good, considering you haven’t played for two years,” Alan vowed.
And as he spoke Michael wondered if Alan had ever wished for his company in the many stressful games from which he had been absent.
Michael now became one of that group of happy immortals in the entrance-hall, whose attitudes of noble ease graced the hot-water pipes below the ‘board’ on which the news of the school fluctuated daily. This society, to which nothing gave admission but a profound sense of one’s own right to enter it, varied from time to time only in details. As a whole composition it was immutable, as permanent, as decorative and as appropriate as the frieze of the Parthenon. From twenty minutes past nine until twenty-seven minutes past nine, from twenty-five minutes past eleven until twenty-eight minutes past eleven, from ten minutes to three until two minutes to three the heroes of the school met in a large familiarity whose Olympian laughter awed the fearful small boy that flitted uneasily past and chilled the slouching senior that rashly paused to examine the notices in assertion of an unearned right. Even masters entering through the swinging doors seemed glad to pass beyond the range of the heroes’ patronizing contemplation.
Michael found a pedestal here, and soon idealized the heedless stupidity of these immortals into a Lacedemonian rigour which seemed to him very fine. He accepted their unimaginative standards, their coarseness, their brutalityas virtues, and in them he saw the consummation of all that England should cherish. He successfully destroyed a legend that he was clever, and though at first he found it difficult to combat the suspicion of æsthetic proclivities and religious eccentricity, even of poetic ambitions which overshadowed his first welcome, he was at last able to get these condoned as a blemish upon an otherwise diverting personality with a tongue nimble enough to make heroes guffaw. Moreover, he was a friend of Alan, who with his slim disdain and perfectly stoic bearing was irreproachable, and since Michael frankly admired his new friends, and since he imparted just enough fantasy to their stolid fellowship to lend it a faint distinction, he was very soon allowed to preserve a flavour of oddity, and became in time arbiter of whatever elegance they could claim. Michael on his side was most anxious to conform to every prejudice of the Olympians, esteeming their stolidity far above his own natural demeanour, envious too of their profoundly ordinary point of view and their commonplace expression of it.
Upon this assembly descended the news of war with the Transvaal, and for three months at least Michael shared in the febrile elation and arrogance and complacent outlook of the average Englishman. The Olympians recalled from early schooldays the forms of heroes who were even now gazetted to regiments on their way to the front, and who but a little while ago had lounged against these very hot-water pipes. Sandhurst and Woolwich candidates lamented their ill-luck in being born too young, and consoled themselves with proclaiming that after all the war was so easy that scarcely were they missing anything at all. Then came the first low rumble of defeat, the first tremulous breath of doubt.
Word went round that meetings were being held to stop the war, and wrathfully the heroes mounted a LondonRoad Car omnibus, snatched the Union Jack from its socket, and surged into Hammersmith Town Hall to yell and hoot at the farouche Irishmen and dirty Socialists who were mouthing their hatred of the war and exulting in the unlucky capture of two regiments. The School Cadet Corps could not accept the mass of recruits that demanded to be enrolled. Drums were bought by subscription, and in the armoury down under the School tattoo and rataplan voiced the martial spirit of St. James’.
One day Alan brought back the news that his Uncle Kenneth was ordered to the front, that he would sail from Southampton in a few days. Leave was granted Alan to go and say good-bye, and in the patriotic fervour that now burned even in the hearts of schoolmasters, Michael was accorded leave to accompany him.
They travelled down to Southampton on a wet, windy November day, proud to think as they sat opposite one another in the gloomy railway-carriage that in some way since this summons they were both more intimately connected with the war.
In a dreary Southampton hotel they met Mrs. Ross, and Michael thought that she was very beautiful and very brave waiting in the chilly fly-blown dining-room of the hotel. Three years of marriage scarcely seemed to have altered his dear Miss Carthew; yet there was a dignity, a carven stillness that Michael had never associated with the figure of his governess, or perhaps it was that now he was older, more capable of appreciating the noble lines of this woman.
It gave Michael a sentimental pang to watch Mrs. Ross presiding over their lunch as she had in the past presided over so many lunches. They spoke hardly at all of Captain Ross’s departure, but they talked of Nancy, and how well she was doing as secretary to Lord Perham, of Mrs. Carthew, still among the roses and plums of Cobble Place, and of ahundred jolly bygone events. Mrs. Ross was greatly interested to hear of Stella, and greatly amused by Michael’s arrangement of her future.
Then Captain Ross came in, and after a few jokes, which fell very flat in the bleak dining-room—perhaps because the two boys were in awe of this soldier going away to the wars, or perhaps because they knew that there was indeed nothing to joke about—said:
“The regiment comes in by the 2.45. We shall embark at once. What’s the time now?”
Everyone, even the mournful waiter, stared up at the wall. It was two o’clock.
“Half an hour before I need go down to the station,” said Captain Ross, and then he began to whistle very quietly. The wind was getting more boisterous, and the rain rattled on the windows as if, without, a menacing hand flung gravel for a signal.
“Can you two boys amuse yourselves for a little while?” asked Captain Ross.
“Oh, rather,” said Michael and Alan.
“I’ve just one or two things I wanted to say to you, dear,” said Captain Ross, turning to his wife. They left the dining-room together. Michael and Alan sat silently at the table, crumbling bread and making patterns in the salt-cellar. They could hear the gaunt clock ticking away on the stained wall above them. From time to time far-off bugles sounded above the tossing wind. So they sat for twenty solemn minutes. Then the husband and wife came back. The bill was paid; the door of the hotel swung back; the porter said ‘Good luck, sir,’ very solemnly, and in a minute they were walking down the street towards the railway-station through the wind and rain.
“I’ll see you on the dock in a moment,” said Captain Ross. “You’d better take a cab down and wait under cover.”
Thence onwards for an hour or more all was noise, excitement and bustle in contrast to the brooding, ominous calm of the dingy hotel. Regiments were marching down to the docks; bands were playing; there were drums and bugles, shouts of command, clatter of horses, the occasional rumble of a gun-carriage, enquiries, the sobbing of children and women, oaths, the hooting of sirens, a steam-engine’s whistle, and at last, above everything else, was heard the wail of approaching pipes.
Nearer and nearer swirled the maddening, gladdening, heart-rending tune they played; the Kintail Highlanders were coming; they swung into view; they halted, company after company of them; there were shouts of command very close; suddenly Michael found his hand clenched and saw Captain Ross’s grey eyes smiling good-bye; Alan’s sleeve seemed to have a loose thread that wanted biting off; the sirens of the great transport trumpeted angrily and, resounding through the sinking hearts of those who were not going, robbed them of whatever pluck was left. Everywhere in view sister, mother, and wife were held for a moment by those they loved. The last man was aboard; the gangway was hauled up; the screw pounded the water; the ship began to glide away from the dock with slow, sickening inevitableness. Upon the air danced handkerchiefs, feeble fluttering envoys of the passionate farewells they flung to the wind. Spellbound, intolerably powerless, the watchers on shore waved and waved; smaller grew the faces leaning over the rail; smaller and smaller, until at last they were unrecognizable to those left behind; and now the handkerchiefs were waved in a new fever of energy as if with the fading of the faces there had fallen upon the assembly a fresh communal grief, a grief that, no longer regarding personal heartbreaks, frantically pursued the great graceful ship herself whose prow was straining for the open sea. Still, though now scarcely even werehuman forms discernible upon the decks, the handkerchiefs jigged on for horribly mechanic gestures, as if those who waved them were become automatons through sorrow.
Glad of the musty peace of a railway-carriage after the tears and confusion of the docks, Michael and Alan and Mrs. Ross spoke very little on the journey back to London.
“Aren’t you going to stay the night with us at Richmond?” Alan asked.
“No, I must get down to Cobble Place. My large son has already gone there with his nurse.”
“Your son?” exclaimed Michael. “Oh, of course, I forgot.”
So Alan and he put Mrs. Ross into her train and rode back together on an omnibus, proud citizens of an Empire whose inspiration they had lately beheld in action.
Next morning the Olympians on their frieze were considerably impressed by Michael’s account of the stirring scene at Southampton.
“Oh, the war will be over almost at once. We’re not taking any risks. We’re sending out enough men to conquer more than the Transvaal,” said the heroes wisely.
But soon there came the news of fresh defeats, and when in the middle of January school reassembled there were actually figures missing from the familiar composition itself. Actually contemporary heroes had left, had enlisted in the Volunteers and Yeomanry, were even now waiting for orders and meantime self-consciously wandering round the school-grounds in militant khaki. Sandhurst and Woolwich candidates passed with incredible ease; boys were coming to school in mourning; Old Jacobeans died bravely, and their deaths were recorded in the school magazine; one Old Jacobean gained the Victoria Cross, and everyone walked from prayers very proudly upon that day.
Michael was still conventionally patriotic, but sometimeswith the progress of the war a doubt would creep into his mind whether this increasing blazonry of a country’s emotion were so fine as once he had thought it, whether England were losing some of her self-control under reverses, and, worst of all, whether in her victories she were becoming blatant. He remembered how he had been sickened by the accounts of American hysteria during the war with Spain, whose weaker cause, true to his earliest inclinations, he had been compelled to champion. And now when the tide was turning in England’s favour, when every other boy came to school wearing a khaki tie quartered with blue or red and some of them even came tricked out with Union Jack waistcoats, when the wearing of a British general’s head on a button and the hissing of Kruger’s name at a pantomime were signs of high emotion, when many wastrels of his acquaintance had uniforms, and when the patriotism of their friends consisted of making these undignified supernumeraries drunk, Michael began to wonder whether war conducted by a democracy had ever been much more than a circus for the populace.
And when one bleak morning in early spring he read in a fatal column that Captain Kenneth Ross had been killed in action, his smouldering resentment blazed out, and as he hurried to school with sickened heart and eyes in a mist of welling tears, he could have cursed everyone of the rosetted patriots for whose vainglory such a death paid the price. Alan, as he expected, was not at school, and Michael spent a restless, miserable morning. He hated the idea of discussing the news with his friends of the hot-water pipes, and when one by one the unimaginative, flaccid comments flowed easily forth upon an event that was too great for them even to hear, much less to speak of, Michael’s rage burst forth:
“For God’s sake, you asses, don’t talk so much. I’m sick of this war. I’m sick of reading that a lot of decentchaps have died for nothing, because it is for nothing, if this country is never again going to be able to stand defeat or victory. War isn’t anything to admire in itself. All the good of war is what it makes of the people who fight, and what it makes of the people who stay at home.”
The Olympians roared with laughter, and congratulated Michael on his humorous oration.
“Can’t you see that I’m serious? that it is important to be gentlemen?” Michael shouted.
“Who says we aren’t gentlemen?” demanded a very vapid, but slightly bellicose hero.
“Nobody saysyouaren’t a gentleman, you ass; at least nobody says you eat peas with a knife, but, my God, if you think it’s decent to wear that damned awful button in your coat when fellows are being killed every day for you, for your pleasure, for your profit, for your existence, all I can say is I don’t.”
Michael felt that the climax of this speech was somewhat weak, and he relapsed into silence, biting his nails with the unexpressed rage of limp words.
“You might as well say that the School oughtn’t to cheer at a football match,” said Abercrombie the Captain.
“I would say so, if I thought that all the cheerers never expected and never even intended to play themselves. That’s why professional football is so rotten.”
“You were damned glad to get your Third Fifteen cap,” Abercrombie pointed out gruffly.
The laugh that followed this rebuke from the mightiest of the immortals goaded Michael into much more than he had intended to say when he began his unlucky tirade.
“Oh, was I?” he sneered. “That’s just where you’re quite wrong, because, as a matter of fact, I don’t intend to play football any more, if School Footer is simply to be a show for a lot of wasters. I’m not going to exert myself like an acrobat in a circus, if it all means nothing.”
The heroes regarded Michael with surprize and distaste; they shrank from him coldly as if his unreasonable outburst in some way involved their honour. They laughed uncomfortably, each one hiding himself behind another’s shoulders, as if they mocked a madman. The bell for school rang, and the heroes left him. Michael, still enraged, went back to his class-room. Then he wondered if Alan would hate him for having made his uncle’s death an occasion for this breach of a school’s code of manners. He supposed sadly that Alan would not understand any more than the others what he felt. He cursed himself for having let these ordinary, obvious, fat-headed fools impose upon his imagination, as to lead him to consider them worthy of his respect. He had wasted three months in this society; he had thought he was happy and had congratulated himself upon at last finding school endurable. School was a prison, such as it always had been. He was seventeen and a schoolboy. It was ignominious. At one o’clock he waited for nobody, but walked quickly home to lunch, still fuming with the loss of his self-control and, as he looked back on the scene, of his dignity.
His mother came down to lunch with signs of a morning’s tears, and Michael looked at her in astonishment. He had not supposed that she would be much affected by the death of Captain Ross, and he enquired if she had been writing to Mrs. Ross.
“No, dear,” said Mrs. Fane. “Why should I have written to Mrs. Ross this morning?”
“Didn’t you see in the paper?” Michael asked.
“See what?”
“That Captain Ross was killed in action.”
“Oh, no,” gasped his mother, white and shuddering. “Oh, Michael, how horrible, and on the same day.”
“The same day as what?”
Mrs. Fane looked at her son for a moment very intently,as if she were minded to tell him something. Then the parlour-maid came into the room, and she seemed to change her mind, and finally said in perfectly controlled accents:
“The same day as the announcement is made that—that your old friend Lord Saxby has raised a troop of horse—Saxby’s horse. He is going to Africa almost at once.”
“Another gentleman going to be killed for the sake of these rowdy swine at home!” said Michael savagely.
“Michael! What do you mean? Don’t you admire a man for—for trying to do something for his country?”
“It depends on the country,” Michael answered, “If you think it’s worth while doing anything for what England is now, I don’t. I wouldn’t raise a finger, if London were to be invaded to-morrow.”
“I don’t understand you, dearest boy. You’re talking rather like a Radical, and rather like old Conservative gentlemen I remember as a girl. It’s such a strange mixture. I don’t think you quite understand what you’re saying.”
“I understand perfectly what I’m saving,” Michael contradicted.
“Well, then I don’t think you ought to talk like that. I don’t think it’s kind or considerate to me and, after you’ve just heard about Captain Ross’s death, I think it’s irreverent. And I thought you attached so much importance to reverence,” Mrs. Fane added in a complaining tone.
Michael was vexed by his mother’s failure to understand his point of view, and became harder and more perverse every minute.
“Lord Saxby would be shocked to hear you talking like this, shocked and horrified,” she went on.
“I’m very sorry for hurting Lord Saxby’s feelings,”said Michael with elaborate sarcasm. “But really I don’t see that it matters much to him what I think.”
“He wants to see you before he sails,” said Mrs. Fane.
“To see me? Why?” gasped Michael. “Why on earth should he want to see me?”
“Well, he’s—he’s in a way the head of our family.”
“He’s not taken much interest in me up to the present. It’s rather odd he should want to see me now when he’s going away.”
“Michael, don’t be so bitter and horrid. Lord Saxby’s so kind, and he—and he—might never come back.”
“Dearest mother,” said Michael, “I think you’re a little unreasonable. Why should I go and meet a man now, and perhaps grow to like him—and then say good-bye to him, perhaps for ever?”
“Michael, do not talk like that. You are selfish and brutal. You’ve grown up to be perfectly heartless, although you can be charming. I think you’d better not see Lord Saxby. He’d be ashamed of you.”
Michael rose in irritation.
“My dear mother, what on earth business is it of Lord Saxby’s how I behave? I don’t understand what you mean by being ashamed of me. I have lived all these years, and I’ve seen Lord Saxby once. He sent me some Siamese stamps and some soldiers. I dare say he’s a splendid chap. I know I liked him terrifically, when I was a kid, and if he’s killed I shall be sorry—I shall be more than sorry—I shall be angry, furious that for the sake of these insufferable rowdies another decent chap is going to risk his life.”
Mrs. Fane put out her hand to stop Michael’s flowing tirade, but he paid no attention, talking away less to her than to himself. Indeed, long before he had finished, she made no pretence of listening, but merely sat crying quietly.
“I’ve been thinking a good deal lately about this war,”Michael declared. “I’m beginning to doubt whether it’s a just war, whether we didn’t simply set out on it for brag and money. I’m not sure that I want to see the Boers conquered. They’re a small independent nation, and they have old-fashioned ideas and they’re narrow-minded Bible-worshippers, but there’s something noble about them, something much nobler than there is in these rotten adventurers who go out to fight them. Of course, I don’t mean by that people like Captain Ross or Lord Saxby. They’re gentlemen. They go either because it’s their duty or because they think it’s their duty. And they’re the ones that get killed. You don’t hear of these swaggerers in khaki being killed. I haven’t heard yet of many of them even going to the front at all. Oh, mother, I am fed up with the rotten core of everything that looks so fine on the outside.”
Mrs. Fane was now crying loud enough to make Michael stop in sudden embarrassment.
“I say, mother, don’t cry. I expect I’ve been talking nonsense,” he softly told her.
“I don’t know where you get these views. I was always so proud of you. I thought you were charming and mysterious, and you’re simply vulgar!”
“Vulgar?” echoed Michael in dismay.
Mrs. Fane nodded vehemently.
“Oh, well, if I’m vulgar, I’ll go.”
Michael hurried to the door.
“Where are you going?” asked his mother in alarm.
“Oh, Lord, only to school. That’s what makes a scene like this so funny. After I’ve worked myself up and made you angry——”
“Not angry, dear. Only grieved,” interrupted his mother.
“You were more than grieved when you said I was vulgar. At least I hope you were. But, after it’s all over,I go trotting off like a good little boy to school—to school—to school. Oh, mother, what is the good of expecting me to believe in the finest fellows in the world being killed, while I’m still at school? What’s the good of making me more wretched, more discontented, more alive to my own futile existence by asking me now, when he’s going away, to make friends with Lord Saxby? Oh, darling mother, can’t you realize that I’m no longer a little boy who wants to clap his hands at the sight of a red coat? Let me kiss you, mother, I’m sorry I was vulgar, but I’ve minded so dreadfully about Captain Ross, and it’s all for nothing.”
Mrs. Fane let herself be petted by her son, but she did not again ask Michael to see Lord Saxby before he went away to the war.
Alan was still absent at afternoon school, and Michael, disdaining his place in the heroic group, passed quickly into the class-room and read in Alison of Salamanca and Albuera and of the storming of Badajoz, wondering what had happened to his country since those famous dates. He supposed that then was the nation’s zenith, for from what he could make out of the Crimean War, that had been as little creditable to England as this miserable business of the present.
In the afternoon Michael thought he would walk over to Notting Dale and see Mr. Viner—perhaps he would understand some of his indignation—and this evening when all was quiet he must write to Mrs. Ross. On his way down the Kensington Road he met Wilmot, whom he had not seen since the summer, for luckily about the time of the row Wilmot had been going abroad and was only lately back. He recognized Wilmot’s fanciful walk from a distance, and nearly crossed over to the opposite pavement to avoid meeting him; but on second thoughts decided he would like to hear a fresh opinion of the war.
“Why, here’s a delightful meeting,” said Wilmot, “I have been wondering why you didn’t come round to see me. You got my cards?”
“Oh, yes, rather,” said Michael.
“I have been in Greece and Italy. I wish you had been with me. I thought of you, as I sat in the ruined rose-gardens of Paestum. You’ve no idea how well those columns of honey-coloured Travertine would become you, Michael. But I’m so glad to see that you have not yet clothed yourself in khaki. This toy war is so utterly absurd. I feel as if I were living in a Christmas bazaar. How dreadfully these puttees and haversacks debase even the most beautiful figures. What is a haversack? It sounds so Lenten, so eloquent of mortification. I have discovered some charming Cyprian cigarettes. Do come and let me watch you enjoy them. How young you look, and yet how old!”
“I’m feeling very fit,” said Michael loftily.
“How abruptly informative you are! What has happened to you?”
“I’m thinking about this war.”
“Good gracious,” cried Wilmot in mincing amazement. “What an odd subject. Soon you will be telling me that by moonlight you brood upon the Albert Memorial. But perhaps your mind is full of trophies. Perhaps you are picturing to yourself in Piccadilly a second column of Trajan displacing the amorous and acrobatic Cupid who now presides over the painted throng. Come with me some evening to the Long Bar at the Criterion, and while the Maori-like barmaids titter in theirdévergondage, we will select the victorious site and picture to ourselves the Boer commanders chained like hairy Scythians to the chariot of whatever absurd general chooses to accept the triumph awarded to him by our legislativebourgeoisie.”
“I think I must be getting on,” said Michael.
“How urgent! You speak like Phaeton or Icarus, and pray remember the calamities that befell them. But seriously, when are you coming to see me?”
“Oh, I’m rather busy,” said Michael briefly.
Wilmot looked at him curiously with his glittering eyes for a moment. Then he spoke again:
“Farewell, Narcissus. Have you learnt that I was but a shallow pool in which to watch your reflection? Did I flatter you too much or not enough? Who shall say? But you know I’m always your friend, and when this love-affair is done, I shall always be interested to hear the legend of it told movingly when and where you will, but perhaps best of all in October when the full moon lies like a huge apricot upon the chimneys of the town. Farewell, Narcissus. Does she display your graces very clearly?”
“I’m not in love with anybody, if that’s what you mean,” said Michael.
“No? But you are on the margin of a strange pool, and soon you will be peeping over the bulrushes to stare at yourself again.”
Then Mr. Wilmot, making his pontifical and undulatory adieu, passed on.
“Silly ass!” said Michael to himself. “And he always thinks he knows everything.”
Michael turned out of the noisy main road into the sylvan urbanity of Holland Walk. A haze of tender diaphanous green clung to the boles of the smirched elms, softening the sooty decay that made their antiquity so grotesque and so dishonourable. Michael sat down for a while on a bench, inhaling the immemorial perfume of a London spring and listening to the loud courtship of the blackbirds in the ragged shrubberies that lined the railings of Holland Park. He was not made any the more content with himself by this effluence of revivified effortthat impregnated the air around him. He was out of harmony with every impulse of the season, and felt just as tightly fettered now as long ago he used to feel on waits by this same line of blackened trees with Nurse to quell his lightest step towards freedom. Where was Nurse now? The pungent odour of privet blown along a dying wind of March was quick with old memories of forbidden hiding-places, and he looked up, half expectant of her mummified shape peering after his straying steps round the gnarled and blackened trunk of the nearest elm. Michael rose quickly and went on his way towards Notting Dale. This Holland Walk had always been a haunted spot, not at all a place to hearten one, especially where at the top it converged to a silent passage between wooden palings whose twinkling interstices and exudations of green slime had always been queerly sinister. Even now Michael was glad when he could hear again the noise of traffic in the Bayswater Road. As he walked on towards Mr. Viner’s house he gave rein to fanciful moralizings upon these two great roads on either side of the Park that ran a parallel course, but never met. How foreign it all seemed on this side with unfamiliar green omnibuses instead of red, with never even a well-known beggar or pavement-artist. The very sky had an alien look, seeming vaster somehow than the circumscribed clouds of Kensington. Perhaps after all the people of this intolerably surprizing city were not so much to be blamed for their behaviour during a period of war. They had nothing to hold them together, to teach them to endure and enjoy, to suffer and rejoice in company. These great main roads sweeping West and East with multitudinous chimney-pots between were symbolic of the whole muddle of existence.